What I wonder-- and I wonder this about a lot of other conditions which are not necessarily well-understood from an etiological/mechanistic standpoint...
maybe a subpopulation that shares underlying etiology DOES "recover/change" in some predictable ways during maturation.
It certainly happens in some other diagnoses which are about
function rather than particular quantitative measurement of mechanism. Asthma, for example.
Why is it that SOME asthmatic children "grow out of" that asthma, while others worsen significantly during adolescence?
Most researchers in that field acknowledge that what we currently think of as "Asthma" is likely to actually be a collection of underlying causes which all result in narrowing of the airways ('asthma'). It's a symptom masquerading as a diagnosis, in other words.
I have done very little serious digging in the serious research literature surrounding ASD's, but more in that of ADD/ADHD, and the latter certainly bears the same hallmarks.
So it seems entirely plausible that some children "outgrow" whatever it was that was causing the symptoms of ASD. Too bad not enough is known for clinicians to accurately predict who they are yet.
All parents have now with these kinds of symptom-based umbrella diagnoses is "wait and see what happens during adolescence." We're doing it now with DD's asthma.
